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this red-headed animal's, remained in my mind when I looked at him, sitting all
awry as if his mean soul griped his body, and made me giddy..."I believe Agnes
Wickfield to be as far above you (David says later on), and as far removed from
all your aspirations, as that moon herself!"
Considering how Heep's general lowness—his servile manners, dropped aitches and so
forth—has been rubbed in throughout the book, there is not much doubt about the nature of Dickens's
feelings. Heep, of course, is playing a villainous part, but even villains have sexual lives; it is the
thought of the "pure" Agnes in bed with a man who drops his aitches that really revolts Dickens. But
his usual tendency is to treat a man in love with a woman who is "above" him as a joke. It is one of
the stock jokes of English literature, from Malvolio onwards. Guppy in Bleak House is an example,
John Chivery is another, and there is a rather ill-natured treatment of this theme in the "swarry" in
Pickwick Papers. Here Dickens describes the Bath footmen as living a kind of fantasy-life, holding
dinner-parties in imitation of their "betters" and deluding themselves that their young mistresses are in
love with them. This evidently strikes him as very comic. So it is, in a way, though one might question
whether it is not better for a footman even to have delusions of this kind than simply to accept his
status in the spirit of the catechism.
In his attitude towards servants Dickens is not ahead of his age. In the nineteenth century
the revolt against domestic service was just beginning, to the great annoyance of everyone with over
£500 a year. An enormous number of the jokes in nineteenth-century comic papers deal with the
uppishness of servants. For years Punch ran a series of jokes called "Servant Gal-isms," all turning
on the then astonishing fact that a servant is a human being. Dickens is sometimes guilty of this kind of
thing himself. His books abound with the ordinary comic servants; they are dishonest (Great
Expectations), incompetent (David Copperfield), turn up their noses at good food (Pickwick Papers),
etc. etc.—all rather in the spirit of the suburban housewife with one downtrodden cook-general. But
what is curious, in a nineteenth-century radical, is that when he wants to draw a sympathetic picture
of a servant, he creates what is recognisably a feudal type. Sam Weller, Mark Tapley, Clara Peggotty
are all of them feudal figures. They belong to the genre of the "old family retainer"; they identify
themselves with their master's family and are at once doggishly faithful and completely familiar. No
doubt Mark Tapley and Sam Weller are derived to some extent from Smollett, and hence from
Cervantes; but it is interesting that Dickens should have been attracted by such a type. Sam Weller's
attitude is definitely medieval. He gets himself arrested in order to follow Mr. Pickwick into the
Fleet, and afterwards refuses to get married because he feels that Mr. Pickwick still needs his
services. There is a characteristic scene between them:
"...vages or no vages, notice or no notice, board or no board, lodgin' or no
lodgin', Sam Veller, as you took from the old inn in the Borough, sticks by you,
come what come may..."
"My good fellow," said Mr. Pickwick, when Mr. Weller had sat down
again, rather abashed at his own enthusiasm, "you are bound to consider the
young woman also."
"I do consider the young 'ooman, sir," said Sam. "I have considered the
young 'ooman. I've spoke to her, I've told her how I'm sitivated, she's ready to